I. No racism by the state — what instead?
1.
Racism in the sense of a legal situation by which state power decrees or permits discrimination against parts of the population, up to and including their elimination, no longer exists in the modern bourgeois polity. Neither in the sense of a colonial prerogative that legitimizes domination over immature peoples, nor in the sense of the Nuremberg Laws that make citizenship dependent on membership of an Aryan master race that has a right to world domination, nor in the sense of a right to property in human beings that establishes slavery as a component of the political economy. On the contrary, today’s constitutional state forbids itself, and in general, racial discrimination, because it does not fit its raison d’être.
— It organizes its political economy, which extracts ever more wealth from other people’s labor in the form of productively applied private property, with its bourgeois code under the premise of the legal equality of its citizens as a socially peaceful exchange relationship between employers and the workforce paid for its services.
— Its access or that of its corporations to the resources of the outside world, the exploitation of foreign countries with their living and dead inventory, it regulates as trade traffic within the framework of multilateral, quasi supra-state rules of procedure, which promise equality and fairness; as world trade, which enriches the "export world champion" FRG and other capitalist great powers as if by itself.
— This state defines its people as its exclusive possession through the license — which practically no one can refuse — to make itself freely useful as an activist in the competition for money and life chances — in the case of the FRG: useful for the wealth and the power of the state based on it, as the leading nation of the EU to meet the "rivals" USA, PR China, and Russia at least “at eye level,” on an equal footing in the struggle for precedence over each other and for paternalism of the rest of the world of states. Its state-people are its citizens first and foremost in their function as — current, nascent, or former — actors in the conjunctures of the national capital location, to which only natives are admitted by birth — useful migrants and foreigners under restrictive special legal conditions: a genuine privilege that distinguishes its own from all foreigners. The fight against unwanted immigration from the world’s regions of misery and war objectively fulfills the offense of mass killing by omission or by an active border regime; but this too gets by without any racist justifications.
2.
Everything that the bourgeois constitutional state establishes and undertakes, it places — in proud demarcation against other, even against racially justified forms of rule — under the sign that it organizes a good, prosperous coexistence for its citizens as a sovereign power in its own exclusive sphere of competence; and that according to generally valid principles of justice, humanity, and human dignity. To these principles belongs the democratic free self-determination of its own citizens entitled to vote, whose well-understood self-interest it realizes and on whose behalf it does what it does in the first place. There is a certain ambiguity in these principles: as the national supreme power, it guards the law and the welfare of the inhabitants of its location, of this particular “human race,” it is specifically and exclusively committed to its conceived mandate; but in doing so, in its capacity as a constitutional state committed to human law, it acts according to maxims of the most general validity and with a scope that excludes nothing and no one. This double meaning continues in the fact that the state, precisely as a power claimed by its own people for their interests, represents a universally valid model of political rule: in the first capacity, it has the sacred duty to successfully enforce the self-interest of the nation and, in this sense, not merely to draw a dividing line between its citizenry and the great rest, but to set and enforce the appropriate priorities. At the same time, from its human rights goodness, to which its constitution and, as its ideal originator, its good people commit it, arises the other duty to stand up for equal treatment of all inhabitants of the earth and to exercise its own sovereign jurisdiction in the interior as well as on its borders and beyond them in this sense, also to influence and, as the case may be, patronize other state powers accordingly, naturally in their proper self-interest.
Of course, the modern constitutional state cannot even remotely detect a contradiction here. For it, the service to the general human right and to the special welfare of its people — the only one of which it has innately at its disposal and which in this possesses its exclusive uniqueness — do not always go together practically, but in principle without a break. At any rate, that is how it wants to be appreciated: everything it produces and cares for with the omnipotence of its law in terms of economically useful wage dependency as well as dysfunctional poverty and other tribulations of everyday competition, what it wreaks in the world with the power of its money, its weapons and its good relations, how it deals at its borders and within with people who have not much to offer other than the pitiful status of merely being “human,” simply all its works are considered to be — possibly not yet perfect — implementations of its high constitutional principles. They are to be measured by nothing else, judged by no other criterion than the ideals in whose name it declares itself the beautiful home of a good people.
3.
And quite as it is meant, this life lie also arrives in the general civic consciousness of democratically mature peoples like that of the FRG. Of course one knows the demands of capitalist competition; one complies with them. Of course one knows that the constitutional state sets the conditions for this with its laws and enforces them with comprehensive police power; one obeys this, more or less, and as a subject of competition one has in any case an eye on whether the others keep to it and earn what they are allowed. One also knows — if one just wants to take note of it — about the brutality with which one’s government drives around at the borders to the homeland and in the outside world, letting people die rather than letting them in, putting the lives of its own people at risk in warlike conflicts, namely making them dependent on their being more effective at killing. The realism of adaptation, of going along with the flow, of ordinary acceptance, of everyday immaturity, with which all this is accepted, is, however, at the same time the firm basis for an indestructible idealism: for the civic habit of judging everything that is done to people by the state and what they themselves do as citizens, from the superior point of view of a community that is obliged and obligated to the general welfare, just as the state pretends to do. The elementary form of this idealism is the “we,” as whose representative the unmistakable individual speaks out whenever and wherever he has something political to report in the broadest sense: a national collectivism that is presupposed by the civic capacity to judge. The citizen, who has damn little to say about his circumstances and about the purposes he actually follows, who has none of it really in his hands, places himself at the same time on the standpoint of responsibility for the great whole into which he is incorporated, under whose reason of state he is perfectly subsumed; so perfectly that, in order to function, he needs to know nothing more of the real determinants of his social existence than, on the one hand, the practical necessities that he must satisfy, and, on the other, that it all happens in his name and has its order. As a thinking and critically judging subject, he has his identity in this civic “we.” The scope of this is objectively determined by the passport; subjectively, there are some degrees of freedom in the moral question of taste as to whom the privilege of being included in the first person of the national plural, i.e., the identity as whose responsible subject the civic individual imagines himself to be, can finally no longer be granted, and within what limits and under what conditions to the members of certain communities or parallel societies in his own country.
So far, so bad: the modern class state’s life lie of being the friendly home of its human maneuverable mass is believed by its inhabitants. But it does not stop there. The democratic polity harbors politically agitated minorities who argue that this life lie must be taken much more seriously and put into practice; by public authority, but above all by the dear people.
II. Anti- and racists: believers in the life lies of the democratic constitutional state
1.
One group, the anti-racists, who are demonized by their opponents as militant “Antifa” and who are called “good people” by some critics who are recognized as serious, always appear in public when racist attacks up to killings by the police or by right-wing extremist “intensive offenders” become public — or not very public at all. The outrage then drives many into the streets who find hounding of foreigners or “foreign- looking” nationals abhorrent; which is easy to have among halfway decent people. One would think; but human decency is not that simple. The case-related surge of disgust is regularly over quickly. The protagonists of the outrage are not satisfied with it. They see in the misdeeds they denounce a general line of xenophobia and in the volatility or lack of protests a general problem.
As far as the latter is concerned, the activists agree — in the Federal German case — with their Federal President, even if they may consider him a hypocrite: “It is not enough not to be a racist. We must be anti-racists! Anti-racism must be learned, practiced and, above all, lived.” — With this, Steinmeier (e.g., on June 16, 20.20) definitely speaks from their hearts. In the so unsustainable anti-racist commitment of the German comrades — because not only the Federal President refers to them with his “we” — the indignant recognize a gross lack of correct, pro-people and especially pro-foreigner attitudes, of steadfast defense of the basic values on which the German people has nevertheless committed itself with its anti-fascist democracy. Complementary to this, they politically classify militant xenophobia, where it demonstratively shows itself or takes action: there are “Nazis” who have to “get out.” Yet “Nazis” does not really mean a political content that the right-wingers represent and their opponents have identified, certainly not the program of the “Third Reich” to conquer the world through and for the select race of Aryan state-builders and to eliminate “world Jewry” for this purpose. The term stands as a polemical shorthand for a deeply reprehensible rejection of what Germany’s anti-racists and their kindred spirits elsewhere advocate. For they are not, and do not want to be, the rejectionist echo of right-wing extremist vulgarities and racially motivated crimes; the fact that at best such a reaction is to be had from the at best selectively outraged people is precisely what makes them so dissatisfied. What needs to be “learned, practiced, lived,” in their view, is not a bit of “anti-,” but the positive commitment to a national “we” that follows the slogan: “We are colorful, not brown — and also no longer just white!” They are concerned with the national people as a large community that excludes no one, certainly not from the point of view that people look like foreigners or live according to their own customs, and that favors no one, certainly not because they conform to an image of the native race. For in the national community that they wish to see, only diverse minorities actually exist at all, a fact that even those who consider themselves to be a “white” majority should remember; for only in the awareness of the diversity of subgroups with equal rights can they co-exist as prosperously as befits a friendly civil society.
This political standpoint means different things in different nations, and each has its own consequences. The emphasis that “white” is ultimately only one color among many and that every other skin color qualifies just as much as an equal member of society, aims in the USA at a discrimination whose anti-racist opponents have no problem with starting from skin color and “race” as given facts. They do not even want to abolish the special “communities” marked by this in the whole of the people of the state. What they want to do away with is any possibly still existing legal unequal treatment that is based on it, and above all any difference in individual life chances, whatever they may be, that is really or possibly connected with it. In other countries, the main point is that groups of immigrants should, on the one hand, be indiscriminately absorbed into the people as a whole, which in turn no longer defines itself monolithically by a single binding moral code, something that has long been obsolete anyway in view of what modern people like to perceive as a diversity of lifestyles. In the sense of such a beautiful pluralism, even the still excluded, possibly reactively self-segregating parallel societies are to meet with all others, including the natives, in the infinite of the integrative total nation.
All this is undoubtedly well-intentioned. And at the same time an oath of revelation about the source of this attitude. For it is not only the case that the champions of a non-discriminatory national community, which “we” must “live,” ignore the political and political-economic reality in which the desired “colorful” unity in diversity takes place; that they find the hardships and vulgarities of the permanent competition for money and career, of which they know just about everyone concerned, just not as important as the false consciousness of the privilege of being a white native. They take sides with the pretense that the same state that sells its citizens their service to the nation as the privilege of the autochthonous population simultaneously claims for itself and holds up as the ultimately decisive yardstick for its goodness and generosity: the ideals of equality and the reconciliation of all social antagonisms under its regime. They adopt the mendacious self-image of bourgeois rule, according to which everything it wreaks within the country, on its borders, and throughout the world can at best and exclusively be held against it from the point of view that perfection in the realization of the true, the good, and the beautiful, for which it is absolutely responsible, is hard to come by on this earth, the reality for which it does not allow itself to be deprived of responsibility thus sometimes looks ugly. The critical exhortations that the anti-racists give to politics and the great “we,” word for word with their head of state, are invocations of the life lie of the bourgeois constitutional state, which they would like to make “more colorful” — and in this they are fundamentally wrong.
2.
The others, the fans of a homeland that excludes strangers and foreigners, do not have a good reputation in the nations that also have use for useful foreigners and even know what to do with migration politically. Their opponents accuse them of racism; this is a suitable invective because the responsible state prohibits and outlaws racial discrimination by invoking the highest values. Openly racist fan clubs do a lot to ensure that the insults do not hit the wrong people and that the image of the “ugly German / American / White …” does not die out in the critical and self-critical comparison of the people’s characters. What easily disappears into the background in public opinion is the firm civic attitude that is active there and that only sometimes expresses itself explicitly, more often implicitly, and often enough not at all racist.
First of all and in the main, the activists of the :right-wing scene” are hardcore nationalists. Their provocative ‘question’ “Are you German or what!,” posed to fellow citizens who lack ostentatious hatred of foreigners, aims — quite analogously to the demand of their opponents to “live” “anti-racism” — not at a mere rejection, is not a negative echo to the presence of foreigners in the country. What is demanded is a positive commitment, which in their opinion comes far too short, to their own people and to their outstanding character documented in language, customs, history, a “leading culture” and its monuments. For them, this is not a social attribute in the sense that practical necessities and the ruling purposes that are effective in them determine people’s actions, impose suitable considerations on them, and become ‘second nature’ by habit; this idea of people as character masks has nothing to do with the political-economic conditions of life and survival that the class state imposes on its people in accordance with its competitive success in the world of states. They think of being born to the status of a product of the circumstances into which a person is born, of the circumstances of life in a quite comprehensive sense, right down to landscape and kinship, as the spiritual and mental identity that determines the bourgeois subject; habitual adaptation to what not only they like to call “roots” is regarded by them as the bourgeois virtue par excellence. In this they are, prove, and prove themselves to be radical adherents of the sham on which the class state insists when it fits its human base by the force of its law into the schemes of capitalist competition for money and career: it would be the task manager of a aboriginal popular will given to it and the guardian of a national guiding culture that belongs to the essence of its ancestral people. In the sense of this ideal, the particularly consistent patriots cultivate a world of imagination that deals with the historical grandeur of the people; with stories that create meaning and with a world of images that are lied into existence, they assure themselves of the appearance of homeland with which the state authority surrounds itself. They believe in it all the more fervently, even when they accuse the current custodians of the nation of failing in their actual mission and the people of lacking a sense of home.
The interpretation of the bias in native circumstances as the true identity of the bourgeois subject is suitable for the racist continuation, according to which this identity is not merely something rooted in nature, but literally a piece of nature; as if the legal category of the native citizen were only the external side of an innate, zoologically objective nationality. Homeland, people, and custom are regarded as determinations of nature that give existence its meaning and establish its value, nationality as a quality that one can reject with ill will, but in doing so one commits a betrayal of the national community and of oneself as its product and representative. With this fiction, consistent hardcore patriots justify their rigid resolution of incompatibility against everything foreign: different national collectives can and should exist and live side by side, but they must not mix; foreigners in one’s own country are not only foreign bodies, their presence is per se an attack on one’s own identity; tolerance in this question is self-abandonment. Complementary to racist xenophobia, the family deserves the highest esteem: as the germ cell of the great human race, which, provided the correct choice of partners, reproduces in this way. And so on.
That in the everyday life of the national capital location it depends first of all on completely different things than on the care of one’s own and the defense against foreign natural and cultural assets, is of course also clear to the right-wing nationalists. But they, like all patriots of every stripe, do not accept the fact that they themselves and their fellow citizens are in the main nothing more than the maneuverable mass of the domestic state power subsumed under capital growth and nailed down to competition. As moralists of the commonwealth, they measure everything that the rulers need from and do with their citizens for the cultivation of their power and wealth against the notion of a sovereign promise to secure for the people as an exclusive right their partiality in all conditions of life that are considered home. This is their reading of the ideal significance that the rule of law attaches to the privilege of the natives to be allowed to serve the nation as a maneuverable mass by right.
With the corresponding moral claim to justice in matters of xenophobia, racists in the modern class state, on the one hand, get their money’s worth: the latter has its own solid reasons for keeping the misery of the world away from its borders, which need not interest a nationalist any further; but the fact that a successful border regime against undesired immigration cannot do without walls and take no account of fatal “individual cases” and that the liberal constitutional state must make life hell for those who slip through anyway, so that word gets around worldwide and the migrants lose their desire to immigrate, is something both sides understand quite well. On the other hand, the very fact of the presence of non-natives in the country brings the authorities the reproach of forgetting one’s duty towards one’s own people, and on this basis the suspicion that they are pursuing the project of “repopulation.” This drives some right-wing radicals to the deeds in which Hegel’s insight that morality is “always on the verge of turning evil” proves true, and which repeatedly reinforce the team’s bad reputation.
III. Liberty for the people or equality for the people: Persuasion for the right mindset
Nothing is known of attempts by the representatives of opposing readings of ordinary state and civic idealism to convince the other side. Both factions consider this to be futile from the outset; probably rightly so. It is all the more important for them to cut off the water from the other side by influencing the people in the sense of their patriotic morality; directly via agitation and via the organized public.
1.
Racists appeal to the citizens’ sense of home; in the simplest way imaginable. Rhetorically, graphically, even with music, familiar living conditions are nicely illustrated in a beautiful coloring; foreign things are cut into it, where it fits, as a brutal disturbance. In this way one can actually influence responsible citizens who are entitled to vote. One takes advantage of the fact that the affirmative position on the native class society, which the bourgeois state prescribes to its people as a self-evident view of its works and the social life it looks after, becomes the habitual, in the end the ordinary point of view, which does not follow from arguments, but prescribes what counts as an argument. As a civic “we,” partiality for the "national cause" — however abstractly and unobjectively determined — already imprints itself on the perception of world events and charges them with moral sentiments. Right-wing radical agitation builds on feelings of homeland of this kind when it supplies the affirmative consciousness with meaningful visual material. But of course this is not enough to turn ordinary party supporters of the commonwealth into excited right-wingers who subsume their entire world of experience under the — often disappointed — belief in a natural national community. For the radical activists, at least, this is not enough. For a hearty commitment of the addressees they need a convincing point of view, which qualitatively goes beyond the endless loop of indignant accusations and beautiful examples of lived love of one’s homeland.
That seems difficult: arguments for a partiality that lives from the immediacy of a practical feeling, that looks like a contradiction. But it is quite simple: by shifting the matter to a higher methodological level, namely that of the — allegedly or really, it does not matter — disputed right to take up and make known one’s own point of view. Right-wing agitators take advantage of the fact that in the modern constitutional state with its “civil society” — and in the FRG with its tradition of official anti-fascism and a popular anti-communism in the same way — radicalism in general and racism in particular are outlawed. Against the defense of their propaganda they set the demand for freedom, which would be taken away not only from them, but from every upright right-minded people’s comrade by self-appointed supervisors; a claim to freedom of opinion, which comes in all possible versions, from the basic right, as it is written in the constitution, to the muttered “… one may well still say!” Thus one agitates for the right cause without having to make an argument for it, but also without the possibility of misunderstanding. For the right understanding, the reference to a “political correctness” is sufficient in any case, of which one does not have to say and know more than that people are forbidden with it whatever; in any case: to say what one thinks, “the truth” namely, which does not fit the authorities into their anti-people business, otherwise they would not have to forbid honest people the mouth. With such an appeal to the citizen’s urge for freedom, one has precisely those addressees on one’s side who consider even the demand for reasons for their views an imposition of elitist know-it-alls, every argument paternalism.
The strength of this quid pro quo, the shifting of political content to the level of the may, is shown by the fact that it puts all opponents and even the most accommodating proponents of decorum on the defensive in political discussion. After all, the degradation of any argument into something to which one has a right belongs to the basic principles of the liberal-democratic exchange of ideas; the permission to put any nonsense into circulation as a private opinion — and any insight only as a private opinion — hangs so high in the liberal heaven of values that right-wingers and liberals even forgive the author [Rosa Luxemburg] her communism for the one sentence “Freedom is always the freedom of the dissenter!” so well does it please them, far from any context, as a calendar slogan. And that belongs a fortiori to the sanctuaries of democracy, that the electoral vote of the people may not be questioned for reasons, which is tantamount to a right of freedom to political bigotry; in this sense, at any rate, the slogan “We are the people!” has become the agitational property of the right.
And they are not the only ones who are sure that with their representative, offended rejection of the ongoing paternalism of ordinary people who do nothing but love their homeland, and with their invocation of the right to purge this homeland of all foreigners, they are speaking from the heart of their addressees. All the advocates of a cosmopolitan civil society who are worried about a possible shift to the right in the popular mood if the government — many believe — continues to impose migrants on its citizens and insists on anti-racism as a moral norm and corresponding language regulations, attest to this.
2.
On the one hand, the advocates of an integrative civil society that is also friendly to migrants and non-citizens have to deal with a state that literally walks over corpses in its border policy, and in many cases also treats the lives and life chances of members of different population groups — differentiated according to origin, skin color, political-economic status — quite differently internally; the latter, although not — anymore — by law, is certainly recognizable in the practice of many state organs. With their criticism, their call for indignation about this, the activists do themselves easy here on the one hand. As far as domestic discrimination is concerned, especially in its brutal manifestations, they have the legal situation on their side; not in the case of the border regime, but in questions of its murderous enforcement at least some courts do. Racist practices, on the other hand, are not going away. And this reveals a certain contradiction in their struggle on this front: they direct their demand for improvement at the political regime, which in part de facto and tacitly, in part explicitly by law, proceeds in a way they do not want. That this does not seem at all contradictory to most activists betrays a misplaced faith in a different, much better mission of state power; a faith that overrides brutal reality with a big “actually” and replaces the determination of the political reason of state, the consequences of which one is outraged about, with the accusation of deviation from what was “actually” promised. The idea of a human right, which the state powers would have to obey truly and punctually, plays the major role here and cannot be shaken either by the use that the great powers make of this supreme value when they morally prepare opponents for firing, or by the looseness with which they shelve appropriately justified attacks on their policies as trivial moralism.
In order to push the state power in the right direction, democratic anti-racists rely on the public — and are thus at their main task of fighting discrimination and xenophobia in society in the first place. Here they have to deal with the radical minority of those who accuse the state of anti–grass roots policies and the people of a lack of love of their homeland, and who sometimes use violence themselves in order to cleanse the nation of its people and to show its citizens the way to the right. They are, of course, the enemy in the case of direct confrontation, but overall they are not the real problem. That is the vast majority of society, which publicly and also privately rejects forbidden discrimination, and in general recognizes the principle that all people in principle belong to be treated equally. So the anti-racists can be sure that they don’t need any great justification for their principles. But it doesn’t help: this majority can’t be mobilized properly, can’t be won over for an effective objection against the political and social mistreatment of foreigners and domestic alleged problem groups.
The propaganda of anti-racism meets here with the moral economy of the competitive society, in which appeals to conscience, which is attested to society, but is only supposed to be awakened by protests, have their fixed value. They are and will be booked as reminders of the beautiful appearance that the community asserts for the right understanding of what it expects of its inhabitants and what it compels them to do, and which the participants also allow to apply, without forgetting or even suspending the realism of the adapted participation. In this sense, it is clear that discrimination does not belong. In the competition for money and career, however, it is part of the professional tools of those who have to decide about the success and failure of others, dependents, as well as generally to the weapons in a life struggle in which success can only be had at the expense of others. In doing so, and certainly also for this, the competitive ideals of fairness and equality of opportunity are brought into play; as well as — especially important where and because it is a matter of advancement and relegation in the hierarchy of income and burdens in professional life — the idea of performative justice, which excludes discrimination according to extraneous points of view; actually, at least, because the harsh reality does not work that way after all. But above all, what does ‘extraneous’ mean? What does ‘objective’ mean in the competition for performance practiced by modern capitalist class society? Adherents of the idea of a somehow objective allocation of performance (open question: which and for whom?) and remuneration (for how much?) must be quite brave here and face the ugly reality: the proper criterion for success and failure in the bourgeois struggle for life is nothing but the actual result. The fact that this is attributed to individual virtues, such as efficiency or — already close to reality — assertiveness, is nothing but the justifying pseudo-conclusion from the result to the actor who brought it about.
But what does that matter to outraged anti-racists? They insist that ‘external’ characteristics such as skin color or more internal ones such as religion or group-specific customs should play no role in free competition. And here the conditions worldwide leave a lot to be desired: almost everywhere the chances — whatever they may be! — of colored and other minorities are clearly smaller than those of their white colleagues and competitors or those who belong to the ancestral people of the state. Thus, to the anti-racist gaze, modern society shows itself to be a hierarchy of positions, of income, of power, and of competition for advancement and relegation; and that this would be good, they do not want to claim at all, nor do they necessarily deny that there is somehow capitalism at work. They just take the liberty of placing alongside hierarchy and competition, and the free market economy’s purposes at work therein, the scandal of discrimination that violates equality of opportunity for advancement, wealth, and power at each of the ‘levels’ of success and failure specified therein. Their critical yardstick is equality in inequality; and indeed in the inequality that follows from capital’s domination of society’s labor and wealth, establishes dependencies and power, and has as its content poverty and the compulsion to make oneself useful to alien interests. The critics of racism do not want to praise the fact that on each of these ‘levels’ of the social hierarchy, defined by their capitalist function, a struggle for success at the expense of others rages; they want to blame the fact that among the criteria according to which those in charge decide on the success or failure in life of those dependent on them, and among the means of application and competition of those about whom decisions are made, are also characteristics of skin color, etc. They criticism from the standpoint of the ideology of racism. They criticize from the standpoint of the ideal of an abstraction that the social elite would have to heed in the use of its decision-making power and the dependents in their competition for success through adaptation.[] For the cosmos of higher values, in which the bourgeois polity so readily reflects itself, these are in any case useful additions: constructive contributions to the realm of the “actual,” as whose imperfect realization this being wants to be perceived, certainly also critically.
Some doubt this promise, others despair of the activists of anti-racist protest. Some are disappointed, but not discouraged; they try again and again, from one scandal to the next, to improve society by speaking into its conscience. Others conclude from their repeated bad experiences with the cultural technique of competitive idealism, which is so widely applied in the bourgeois polity, that society is hopelessly mired in moral inconsistency or hypocrisy and cannot be saved for the time being, and they reject it.[] Authoritative spokesmen of the movement process disappointment and bitterness into the socio-critical diagnosis that racism is obviously much deeper seated and entrenched than where it can still be reached by moral appeals. Where, this can be seen from the everyday experiences of members of relevant “problem groups”: people who are constantly treated as not belonging, at least feel treated as strangers, when they want to be nothing but fully integrated citizens and accepted without ifs and buts as part of the national community. Their perception of exclusion and discrimination reveals where racism lurks everywhere and what it actually consists of.
And this is not to be denied: “people of color,” migrants, even those of the umpteenth generation, and members of other ‘parallel societies’ are quite stereotypically confronted with reservations that make life extra difficult for them as such in the world of omnipresent, politico-economically justified, correspondingly powerful discrimination by capitalist competition. The facts with which they have their particularly bad experiences are the prevailing civic patriotism in its elementary form: the national “we,” in which an exclusionary legal consciousness of the native citizen always has its place; solidified into an emotionally evaluative view of the world. Another thing is the point of view under which discrimination experienced by oneself or perceived in the environment triggers consternation and is criticized. Here the high values of the bourgeois state and of free competition regularly come into play in practice: violated is the ideal of equal treatment with which the bourgeois state makes its society happy when it organizes its use by “the economy.” Violated is the idea of justice of performance, with which the system of competition gives itself the best report card. And the promise of the national state, with which every inhabitant could be fully at home purely as a human being, is not fulfilled at all. If someone is personally offended by the disregard of these values, then his sense of right has become in the same way the standpoint of practical interest in the world and its perception and judgment as in the case of the majority patriot the narrow-minded idealism of the exclusive homeland. And he himself, in his affliction, is the bodily proof that “structural” racism is present here.
It is in the nature of this diagnosis that as much of this racism is uncovered as the sensibilities of those actually or vicariously affected will allow. Accordingly, there is much for conscientious anti-racists to do. A popular battlefield is the wide field of names and signs, traditions and monuments, which represent the nation’s stupid pride in figures and deeds from the colonialist, openly racist prehistory of today’s states and which are therefore held in honor by offended patriots of the “One will still be allowed to say…,” if necessary with violence against them. and, if necessary, defended by force against attempts at overthrow that are meant to be symbolic. Once set in motion, there is no stopping the morally valuable need to pin down racism beyond judgment and discernible intentions and eliminate it from the world. In some circles, especially academic ones, it has now led to a veritable contest of sensibilities. One could confidently leave this to the confectioners, the ornithologists and the Duden editors, if the incriminated finds were not charged with such fundamental significance, as if the critical spirit were actually on the trail of the misery of nationalism.
Where has one ended up? In any case, an acquittal for the contemporary class state, which neither needs nor can use declared racism to discriminate against people in a useful way and, where necessary, to figuratively and literally walk over dead bodies.
1. The theory of “White Privilege” — to illustrate, a quote from Reni Eddo-Lodge: Why I No Longer Talk to White People About Skin Color, 2019: “How am I supposed to define White Privilege? It’s so hard to describe a void, something that is absent. And White Privilege is the absence of the negative consequences of racism. The absence of structural discrimination, the absence of ‘because of the color of my skin, I’m less likely to succeed.’ It is the absence of slanted looks, … the absence of lifelong subtle marginalization and being stamped Other — the exclusion from the narrative of being human. To describe and define this absence is to stop putting whiteness at the center and to remind white people that their experience is not the norm for the rest of us.” (p. 97) — thrives on this ideal of equality in the diversity of ranks that make up the hierarchy of capitalist competitive society. Some anti-racists represent this ideal so consistently that they reject the sweeping abstraction of racial differences (the concept of “colorblindness”) and demand for every function in class society that is somehow endowed with power, in the end for every métier — even that of translating poetry is no exception — measures that are supposed to compensate for real or imagined privileges and disadvantages suffered, possibly still existing or threatening to be overcome, and consequently explicitly link to the respective group-specific particularity. Of course, the spokesmen of this dialectical idealism of equality defend themselves against the clumsy accusation of inverted racism: they merely insist on the complete subsumption of the individuals under their special, particularly colored community, which is to be asserted equally for all “races.”
2. It’s hard to say whether the protest slogan "Black lives matter!" in the U.S. stands more for the former or the latter. Where has one ended up? In any case, an acquittal for the contemporary class state, which neither needs nor can use declared racism to discriminate against people in a useful way and, where necessary, to figuratively and literally walk over dead bodies.
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